Splash Damage Blog

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

September 29th 2007. The iPhone had just gone on sale, Gordon Brown had just been appointed Prime Minister, and a plucky studio in London was celebrating releasing a brand-new game.

We sat down with Arnout Van Meer and Richard Jolly, founders of Splash Damage, for a trip down memory lane.

Arnout Van Meer: “[This] was the first title we did where we really felt like a proper company, instead of some amateurs that managed to land a lucky project!”

Quake is an IP that had been established over many years, long before the opportunity arose for Splash Damage to work on it. Three small rooms, a dozen staff working on projects – this was the classic “bedroom developer".

Splash Damage was a studio built from the community. Its first major project, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, had garnered praise the world over.

AVM: “After finishing Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (Wolf:ET), id Software and Activision were happy with the reception of a multiplayer-only title and were looking to do more with their franchises. Doom 3 had already been announced but was single player only at this point. To get familiar with their technology, we helped id Software out with adding multiplayer to Doom 3. While some of the team were completing work on this, the rest of us shifted over to do a proof of concept for a large, open terrain based game with vehicles based on that technology.”

There were a number of key challenges facing Splash Damage during production; but the scope of the game wasn’t one of them."

We’re excited to announce that we’re teaming up with leading free-to-play developer and publisher Wargaming on brand-new projects. With years of competitive multiplayer experience under our collective belts, it’s a match made in heaven.

Check out what Splash Damage’s CEO and Founder, Paul Wedgwood had to say about the partnership:

“Splash Damage is known for building loyal relationships with the world’s leading platforms, IPs and suppliers, and creating one-of-a-kind teamplay hits. "As gamers, Victor and I share the same passion for our communities. We actively listen to players and strive to put their needs first, whilst forging multiplayer experiences that champion cooperation and help develop new friendships. The Wargaming universe gives our team a great creative canvas, allowing us to develop a game experience for a massive, loyal following, and we’re extremely excited to get started.”

With the partnership underway we’re actively hiring, so if you’re interested in a studio that’s twice celebrated receiving the Sunday Times Best Companies accreditation (an award, based on employees’ opinions of their welfare at work) and you’ve got the talent to work in an industry leading collaboration, take a look at our open positions.

One of our studio values is mastery and our programmers like to pen an internal tech newsletter which covers coding practices and more advanced C++ knowledge. Our Senior Core Tech Programmer, Valentin Galea wants to share some of these articles with you here, including a dedicated Q&A session after each blog post!

So if you like all things code, let us shepherd you towards the first newsletter in the series:

Introducing the C++ Tech Blog

Bellow you'll find the first edition of our C++ newsletter, almost unabridged from when it was originally sent by email. Enjoy!

Advanced C++: A Tale Of std::function

Some time ago whilst working on one of our projects I needed a system that does a sort of "delayed function execution". Essentially I wanted that when some function were called, instead of doing their logic, I would "record" their arguments and push them in a queue so that at a later point in time I would call them. The project uses Unreal Engine 4 compiled with the latest Visual Studio 2015, so I had all C++11/14 at my disposal!

It's time to get your hands dirty. Ranked Season 3 runs for the next three months, ending on the 12th of September. Now's the time to jump back into the mode Dirty Bomb was built for, with a load of improvements and brand new content.

Ranked Season 2 kicking off tomorrow and running until the 1st of June, it's time to jump back into the mode Dirty Bomb was built for - Hardcore 5v5 matches with friendly fire and team collision enabled.